Posted
by
Soulskill
on Tuesday June 26, 2012 @04:26PM
from the but-it-worked-on-star-trek dept.

An anonymous reader writes "In a detailed interview on the future of education, Bill Gates was surprisingly down on tablets in education — considering that Microsoft just released Surface. He said low-cost PCs are the thing for students, and he dismissed the idea that simply giving gadgets to students will bring change. Quoting: 'Just giving people devices has a really horrible track record. You really have to change the curriculum and the teacher. And it's never going to work on a device where you don't have a keyboard-type input. Students aren't there just to read things. They're actually supposed to be able to write and communicate. And so it's going to be more in the PC realm—it's going to be a low-cost PC that lets them be highly interactive.'"

Yeah, I mean, for my distaste of MS, I really find very little Gates says or does that I actually argue with.

It's really creepy to me: One man starts a cancer foundation, donates to charities, and, at least publicly, seems to be a decent human being, and is generally reviled. Another man is kind of an utter dick, makes abusive business deals, and after years of being a multi-millionaire without contributing anything to society, dies of cancer, and he gets worshiped like some kind of god.

I really find very little Gates says or does that I actually argue with.

All of you must be a bit new here, or a bit on the whipper-snapper end of the age scale.

Gates destroyed a lot of companies through anti-competitive business practices which had very real potential to offer choice and alternative in the market. No, most people don't care about that because "look at the Gates Foundation!!". Netscape had a great product before Microsoft ruined that company and The whole SCO, Novell and Microsoft Linux thing a Gates effort to ruin Free software [cnet.com].

When you watch some really great companies, and products, get decimated by corporate strong-arming over 20+ years you tend to become a bit bitter towards anything Microsoft or Gates. Even the philanthropy. I wouldn't be surprised to find he's making shady money on it.

I see what you're saying, and I agree to a certain extent, but consider a hypothetical situation similar to this.

Gill Bates, founder of Bike-rosoft makes a particular type of bicycle that has a thriving market for accessories; it's so thriving, it's practically an industry all to it's self. Bates gets big, and he has to do some kind of aggressive things to keep his hold on the bicycle market. His main competitors are a steel mill that makes bicycle parts you have to assemble yourself, and another company that makes very expensive but very fancy bicycles from a single piece of steel, engineered such that you can't actually replace any of the few parts.

Now, Gill passes on the torch, and starts to work on other stuff, but he sees that there are some in Africa who could really benefit from bicycles. He also worked in bicycles for years. He stared at his bicycles for years. He believed in his bicycles. Right or wrong, he still believes in his bicycles. They were every bit as much a part of him as anything could be. To a certain extent, they define him.

My question is which bicycle would you expect Mr. Bates to fly over to Africa? Why?

They both made abusive business deals to amass the wealth they have. And I believe Jobs did donate heavily to charities, just not publicly.

he gets worshiped like some kind of god.

I think that sums up what's wrong in general. But it's not wrong because of the reasons you listed. It's wrong because worshipping an individual is wrong.

People should be judged by their actions and the consequences of their actions. No one should be considered intrinsically better than any other person. If they are better people, it is because of what they have done, an

What makes you think that someone who extracts a short-term profit from buying and killing a business is acting in the interest of the market's long-term profit?

- it does NOT matter what the purpose is, as long as there is no government involvement, if the outcome of the business is a profit (which means that for example a company is bought and torn apart and sold off in pieces and this makes more money than it took to buy it), then more efficiency is created than existed while the business was operational.

This money that is extracted as profit is the reward that the fund gets for doing the job right and it's the money the fund can use for further investments, all of this is productive, even things people don't understand or appreciate, because superficially it looks like some form of destruction.

Do you know what happens to a corpse in nature? It gets eaten, it's taken apart and it's used by the remaining living creatures more efficiently, same exact principle.

If someone's labor is no longer needed, how do you expect him to feed himself?

- the same thing people have been doing when their particular buggy whip business was replaced with something more efficient - do something else.

We WANT all jobs that exist today to disappear, that's the entire purpose of everything that we actually do - destroy jobs while creating productivity that was impossible previously.

It used to be that over 90% of all people in existence on this planet had to be searching for food, gathering, farming, hunting, fishing, whatever. Today it's 5%. What are the remaining 95% doing? Did they die out? No, the population since then has increased a number of times, they are still doing something, it's just that they are doing something else, which is what we always want.

We always want to get rid of ALL existing jobs, so that all the things that are done with those jobs can be done without those jobs existing while people can start doing something else completely and we can't even predict what it is they will do, but it sure will be better if that happens.

. And in a lot of cases, such as state-enforced monopolies on last-mile utilities and some state-enforced monopolies on the spread of information, I do consider the exclusivity to be tantamount to theft.

yeah MS was the first software company with a popular product to have a proprietary file format. what were they THINKING? Open source was not even on the radar, hell maybe not in the vocabulary of 95% of the software buying world back then. How long did it take OpenOffice or other products to get even close to the functionality of Word? Hey look! You can use this OPEN SOURCE (say it in an impressive voice) word processor that has 1/2 the features of the leading brand AND is incompatible. File format wa

While I've watched computers go from useless technology, foisted on schools, to useful technology, sought by schools, I can only imagine his brilliant assessment is forged with the same insights that failed to foresee the internet when he was writing The Road Ahead. Bill's strength was always taking what someone else had invented and bundling it into his operating system and driving them out of business -- not because he needed to, but because he felt he needed to.

Some day kids and teachers will be using these in education, while PCs will be relics of the past. He really needs to shut it.

Being a locked down walled garden appliance kind of limits their usefulness.

The iPad is only a locked down walled garden to geeks. To a non-technical person, the iPad opens up much more possibility than is walled off. It would be hard for a teacher to find a useful application that's available on "open" Android, but not on "closed" iPad.

Being a locked down walled garden appliance kind of limits their usefulness.

No, being locked down does not have to limit their usefulness. It does limit their flexibility, but usefulness is something else entirely. If being locked down simplifies the things they want to do then the usefulness has increased by being locked down. Please remember that usefulness is determined by the user and not everyone is like you.

Your kind of ignorance is what you get when you don't really educate students about technology. They don't realize how much bullshit you're spewing right now. They don't understand what's going on.

Who cares about educating students about technology. It is just a tool - much like a calculator. They don't need to understand what's going on - they shouldn't eve

How's that sand-boxed browser working for you? Do you have all the hardware acceleration you need? Can you churn out simd code using the NEON registers of the ARM chip? Got access to the camera, GPS & accelerometer? Are you getting all the multithreaded performance you desire?

We arent defending the 'tablet'. We are pointing out that CHEAP mobile devices are going to be EVERYWHERE. We need to learn how to use them to teach with, not force a desktop paradigm because its familiar. Tablets are not toys, you are a fucking luddite if you think that. Its a portable screen with a big battery, light local processing and huge hooks into 'big iron'. If you cant see how incredibly powerful that combo can be when applied correctly then you are missing the entire point. Dismissing tablets as toys shows your serious lack of vision.

They're definitely better and cheaper than carrying around a backpack full of books. A basic textbook can cost anywhere from $30 to $150 per class, not even talking about the "specialized" books. An e-book doesn't necessarily have to cost anything (distribution, transportation and replication cost is free/minimal) but usually ranges up to $30 in the worst cases (Pearson and the likes).

Better than a stack of books? In some ways, not so in others. I'd offer than a reader with an eink display is better than a tablet for reading and note that ebooks have only one advantage over physical books: size and weight.

If I have to have an ebook, a reader with an eink display is definitely better than a tablet in almost every case. Exceptions include reading crumby scanned PDFs (you'll need to do a lot of scrolling) and reading in the dark (if you don't mind staring at a light bulb). Overall, it's

eTextbooks are rented at a cost of $15-30/yr, per student. Schools tend to use many textbooks for a number of years, it will be much more expensive to rent a $15/yr textbook for the 7 years they use it vs. the $50 print version they own.

I know, you are just gonna wave your hands and make all textbooks much cheaper, but until you do, this is the reality of eTextbooks. Oh, and good quality tablets are a lot closer to $500/ea that an iPad costs than the $139-200 tablet you saw on woot.com... Hand kids a free l

Textbooks are not kept for many years. Most textbooks change every year and have to be re-purchased. At least in the US.

Also, e-Textbooks can be free. There have been many efforts in that space and I think that's where we should move towards especially now that classic textbooks are being taken over by special interest groups - there have been so much advances in science but the textbooks (even high school and college) still talk about classic Newtonian physics as being the rule of the universe instead of e

First you have to re-do curriculums to use the 'toys' properly, and I work in education, I can tell you for every passionate, forward-looking teach in a school building, there are 4 teachers jut 'doing time, running the same class year after year' and one teacher who actually stinks at their job, yet hold tenure.

No you don't.In the 1920s the newest technology was the shortwave radio which allowed worldwide communication. Did teachers suddenly needs radios in every classroom to be teachers? No. In the 1950s the newest technology was the TV. Did teachers suddenly needs TVs to be teachers? No. Now it's the tablet. (And the answer is still no.)

>>>you are a fucking luddite if you think that

Do you speak like that in front of your students? And no not a luddite. I just don't see how I am supposed to enter my engineering equations into a tablet. Or how students are supposed to do it either.

No you don't.In the 1920s the newest technology was the shortwave radio which allowed worldwide communication. Did teachers suddenly needs radios in every classroom to be teachers? No. In the 1950s the newest technology was the TV. Did teachers suddenly needs TVs to be teachers? No. Now it's the tablet. (And the answer is still no.)

This was in large part because we tried to just drop the new technology into the classroom with no concept of how to use it to improve education. We kept the same education processes so of course the new technology didn't make a significant difference.

What old Billy-boy is missing is that Tablets [and even PCs still I think] have the *POTENTIAL* to significantly improve education; not by simply dropping them in classrooms, but by completely changing the way education is done. All this technology has the capability to be a major force multiplier for teachers. This requires the radical steps of:

a) Researching and developing curriculum based on the capabilities of the available technologies - something that can't be done overnight. This will take time.

b) Training the teachers and educators on this new curriculum AND the new technology. Unfortunately, far too many current teachers have ZERO tech skills. Seriously, my mother, step-dad and ex-wife are all teachers. My ex is the only one with any tech skills, and nobody else at their schools can even figure out an iPad. This will involve tech skills being part of future teacher certification and training.

c) Most importantly - the financial and political backing of these changes, and the willpower to see it through. Nothing here is a quick fix, and unfortunately educational administrators tend to try new educational 'trends' and drop them at an alarming rate if they don't make insane improvements immediately. Then a decade or two later, the exact same 'trend' comes along with a new name and it happens all over. They are like a serial dieter, they want a quick-fix pill that works instantly and that just isn't going to happen.

And no not a luddite. I just don't see how I am supposed to enter my engineering equations into a tablet. Or how students are supposed to do it either.

This is where the research and development come into play, both on a technological and curriculum basis. PCs/Tablets are obviously not the answer to every possible educational situation. Just because you can come up with one example of a situation which may be difficult to do on a tablet doesn't mean that tablets and other technological innovations can't make a significantly positive impact on education as a whole.Over time, I hope that touch-screen capabilities improve to the point where you can [with or without a stylus] write as quickly and efficiently on the tablet as you can on a piece of paper with pen and pencil. Until then, paper can still be used for classes which require it, and tablets/PCs can be used for classes which don't.

Your assessment on technology is wrong, because it focuses on the technology not the tasks technology is supposed to do.

a) The focus is on what "technology can do" is wrong. It should be changed to "what the student needs". Technology is a tool, not an end to the means.

b) Training has got to be desired. Most teachers I know (I'm in education, as technology professional) don't want training, don't want the technology, don't want the shit crammed down their throats. They don't want it, and don't have the desi

Input speed. Entering text on a tablet is just painful. The reduced precision from the use of squishy fat fingers also makes fine graphical work difficult. They are great for web browsing, video watching, reading... consuming content. But actually creating anything more than a sentence long is impractical.

Input speed can always be adapted to. I would put money on the fact that my 15 year old daughter can T9 text on her phone faster than you can type. Once you adapt to a new technology, input speeds are negligible.

T9 is a dictionary-based input acceleration method.It's only good for quickly typing common words and phrases (and given all the example of mis-corrected/mis-typed message, it is even bad at that).It's not designed at all to input complex unusual inputs.And usually, activities in a school tend to be on the morte complex side than the simple "Sorry mom, I'm going to be late for supper, I'll be first going to the library with a friend" sentences for which T9 is designed.

Usually, the more functionnality is directly available at the push of a button (a hardware on, which can be found blindly through tactile feed-back), the faster you can command a device.That's why no matter what fancy ribbon with icon is the latest trend, it won't beat the speed of someone knowing and using proper short-cuts.

The same way, no matter how fast your 15yo can use T9, she won't be able to type in complex formulas or academic texts, simply because her typing method requires a lot of button pushing for unusual words, whereas I have direct access to any symbol I might need to type.

The only equivalent would be a docked tablet with a full fledged keyboard. But then the advantages when compared to a netbook start to diminish.

Imagine, if you will, a Morse code key input device. With a bit of creativity, you can find a way to use it as a full replacement for your keyboard.

As far as typing goes, you could get pretty fast. The record for 'sending' is something like 75wpm. That's a little faster than the average typist, right? That must mean that Morse code keys are a great replacement for a standard keyboard. Why, they can be made small and portable, even simulated on a touchscreen!

I would put money on the fact that my 15 year old daughter can T9 text on her phone faster than you can type.

Oh buuuuuuuuullshit. The record (as in, fastest typists in the world) at T9 are barely beating 30wpm, which puts the average typist (which your daughter likely is, despite how special a snowflake she is to you) significantly below that.

Anyone who can touch-type on a full size keyboard is going to beat that easily, let alone the world record holders (which is apparently in the league of 215wpm).

Once docked its really not a tablet anymore is it? Plus those docks (and BT keyboards) are an overpriced added expense that I've only seen on high end tablets. We are talking about supplies for millions of students at all grade levels. Do you really think its a good idea to have young kids walking class to class with such expensive equipment?

I can produce documents with equal speed on a PC as I can with a 'docked' ipad

My mileage does vary regarding software stacks. Some of the documents that I produce include tables, charts, and graphs based on the output of programs that I wrote for the purpose of making the document. The walled garden approach of the iPad makes this impossible without using the iPad as a VNC terminal to run the software on a PC, which requires an expensive data plan if I'll be doing it during the bus commute. Yeah, I'm probably an outlier, but that's part of why I stick with a 10" laptop instead of an

Are you fucking kidding me? Do you not realize how ridiculous you made your own argument sound? Let me summarize/paraphrase what you just said: "I can use my tablet the same as a PC, so long as I have several peripherals attached to it that render the fact that it is a tablet, and not a PC, absolutely moot."

So you have to have:- Your Tablet- External Monitor- Apple TV- Bluetooth Keyboard

All to have the same functionality as a laptop.

Way to be a tool bag. Yeah, tablets are a great invention. But as of right now, they are VERY much more for consumption than they are for production. The differences between Tablets and PCs is similar to that of a fork and a spoon: there are several situations where frankly, you could get away with using either or, but at the end of the day they serve two entirely different, albeit related, purposes.

I remember when I first starting going to LAN parties. We'd organise an all night session so we could maximise game time, but even with a room full of IT nerds we very rarely got half of the allotted time dedicated to playing. There was always issues with setup, or some one forgot something and needed to borrow something, or someone's PC wasn't working right, or had different version of drivers/software/apps. It would take a good couple of hours just to get everything working right. I pity the poor teacher

If tablets are made as toys for rich kids they aren't going to have value in the classroom. True, you could take a tablet or a mobile phone type device and make it into a useful learning aid, but by itself they aren't necessarily, and if the accessories and tools added to it really make it into a device for you to sit on your couch with, well guess what, that's not an in classroom device.

I think if you look at surface, from the limited preview I've seen, MS is going the route of a slate for

We arent defending the 'tablet'. We are pointing out that CHEAP mobile devices are going to be EVERYWHERE. We need to learn how to use them to teach with, not force a desktop paradigm because its familiar.

So instead of pushing a desktop paradigm because it's familiar, we should push a tablet paradigm because it's new and even though people haven't figured out how to most effectively use tablets, they better figure out how to use them because they are going to be EVERYWHERE whether they are better than the alternative or not?

If you cant see how incredibly powerful that combo can be when applied correctly then you are missing the entire point. Dismissing tablets as toys shows your serious lack of vision.

My biggest problem with a tablet is not its display or CPU capabilities, especially with a stable network connection to reach cloud resources. My problem is that I just don't find a touch screen to be that usable for entering large amounts of data. Keeping notes in a one hour meeting is tolerable, but typing any significant amount of data (or code) is much harder on a tablet (plus there's losing half the screen real estate to the on screen keyboard)

And while I could get a bluetooth keyboard and turn the tablet into a laptop, I prefer to just use a laptop in the first place. My asus zenbook isn't a whole lot bigger than a tablet, but I find it to be much more usable. Maybe this will change with Windows 8 when my tablet OS and laptop OS are the same, so I can switch seamlessly between them and leave my laptop on my desk, and take the tablet when I'm mobile but still have the same UI experience. Or maybe the Motorola Atrix style philosophy will win out and my tablet will be my only computer, I just plug it into a docking station with full size monitor and keyboard when I'm at my desk.

Given the number of obvious auto-correct mistakes from coworkers that email me from their tablet, I think they have the same problems with typing on a tablet as I do.

Right now they are just toys. They are not doing anything currently that is in any way advancing computing, except by being portable. They're basically just larger smartphones, not as portable as a smartphone but not as powerful as a desktop computer. They're so new that they are still fads at the moment, and a fad should never be treated as a must-have in education, no matter how often people keep making that mistake.

Education is full of fads and the next magic bullet to teach with. Very little of it lasts or is shown over time to be useful. This is just another one of the things to give kids something to do while the teacher can grade tests in peace. Filmstrips, then VCRs, modular workbooks, learning labs with audio cassette tapes, Apple IIs given to schools (and TV ads that imply you're a bad parent if you don't buy one) and then ignored and warehoused, etc.

We have a history of "kids must learn this because it's the wave of the future". In 20 years the future will not look like it is now, learning to use DOS in elementary school 20 years ago isn't that useful a skill today. But parents and politicians have a fear that the children will not be good workplace drones, so they're focusing on drone like workplace skills instead of teaching students to learn and think. If you have a work force that can learn and think and adapt then we'll have a very good society. Learning and thinking are hard and will not happen with some magic bullets, it requires face to face teaching that no technology will help with.

smaller, easier to store, portable can be moved to a more convenient location.

So is my phone, but replacing all laptops with phones for that reason is only slightly more idiotic than doing the same with tablets. Still no advantage to tablets over laptops to outweigh the reduction in functionality.

I myself believe that. Bill Gates post Microsoft has different interests and priorities. If you know anything about Gates as a person, you know that he's a serious poker player. He's serious about every game he plays, board games included. He won the PC game and the software game, so there's less incentive to keep playing now and instead be an elder statesman/end Microsoft apologist rant

The new Microsoft tablet does look amazing. It's the first tablet I can justify buying. I'll be able to use that USB port for the actual USB devices I own, unlike with Android. Regarding Microsoft's inability to make a good tablet: it's not really their fault. Microsoft designed a good operating system and even provided OEMs with good hardware designs that take advantage of the software, but as I've been told in tech press circles, the OEMs are stupid and short-sighted -- HP, the whole lot of them, can't think beyond tower computers and laptops unless they're pinned down. Surface is different because Microsoft is making the software AND the hardware too. Honestly, it's going to be a crying shame when Microsoft under-markets this device and kills it off.

Pencil. Paper. Calculator. The keyboard gets in the way of doing anything useful, especially if you're trying to do things involving symbols (like math).

This is why a tablet would be better in most STEM classes than a low cost PC. I tried using my laptop in a CS course for taking notes. But because it wasn't a simple coding class, but more of a mathematical/theoretical course, there was no way I could. Even now, it's hella hard to try typing up papers with any sort of mathematical representations(unless you type everything in LaTeX or try using a GUI equation editor).

Pencil. Paper. Calculator. The keyboard gets in the way of doing anything useful, especially if you're trying to do things involving symbols (like math).

This is why a tablet would be better in most STEM classes than a low cost PC. I tried using my laptop in a CS course for taking notes. But because it wasn't a simple coding class, but more of a mathematical/theoretical course, there was no way I could. Even now, it's hella hard to try typing up papers with any sort of mathematical representations(unless you type everything in LaTeX or try using a GUI equation editor).

Have you ever actually tried to take mathematical notes on an iPad? I have

It sucks. Utterly sucks. The touchscreen is nowhere near responsive and accurate enough even with a stylus.

The best thing I've ever found for mathematical/science notes is a Livescribe pen. Paper, pen, nothing else to learn- except that everything is stored and synced to audio.

Mod parent up. It really sucks to take any technical notes on an iPad. Hell, it sucks for taking notes period - whether thats using an onscreen keyboard, a drawing app and a stylus, or whatever. A laptop is better, but is far from adequate.

The best lecturers I've had (admittedly this was last century, before tablets were commonplace but still totally impractical for notes) gave the class partial notes for the class. Nobody had to worry about writing the boiler plate stuff - instead they could concentrate on the topic and start to understand it. The lecturer would then ask someone in the lecture what the blanks should be - and we all filled in the important bits (so we got to write it down to help reinforce it, but also got a decent amount of time to THINK rather than writing as fast as we could, missing the important bits, and spending hours trying to catch up. I learnt a LOT in that style of lecture.

However, I do wish that we had permission to record the audio in lectures, and that tech such as livescribe pen existed back then! (on top of the boilerplate notes)

For more basic stuff there is scope for using a tablet. Keeping children's interest up might be possible with a well crafted app that gives them some personal attention that a teacher with a class of 30 might struggle to. Unlike a textbook the tablet can evaluate how the student is going and give them specific help in areas they are having difficulty in.

When reading a tablet with dictionary work lookup and notes to help students through the trickier parts of e.g. Shakespeare could work. It would help the st

It all depends on the teacher. When I was in junior high school in the early nineties, our Algebra teacher utilized a lab of Mac color classics. We learned algebra and graphing. We even used an early projector hooked up to a graphing calculator. In the early nineties this was cutting edge equipment. Tablets and 'computers' in general are the future. Pencils and paper are just technology, it just so happens that they have been around for 10,000 years and its only now that we are innovating.

That's what a stylus is for. You know, the input device missing from 99% of "tablets" these days. I had a Tablet PC all the way through college, and I used it for every class. Still have all of my notes, and still reference them in my PhD work, which is easy since they're completely digitized and search able. Can't do that with Pen and paper. Can't do that with iPad either.

That's because the technology of the screen has changed.Stylus use resistive screen. They have a really fine resolution (and fast response), but only track 1 point at a time.Modern tablet and smartphone (and trackpads, for that matter) use capacitive screens. They can track several fingers at the same time. But are really imprecise. Still they do all the cool gestures, and can be operated with a hand, so they seem nice during a demo, so that's the current preferred way. (Don't mind that you can't use them t

Agreed. As a teacher of pre-tertiary Mathematics I am yet to see the benefit of so called one-to-one in my class, either tablet or laptop or pc. Maybe in a few years when I'm retired tech wil catch up (or teaching AND learning will change), but the technology of pen, paper and calculator cannot be beat. Actually what we are using now has stood the test of more than a few decades: pen paper slide rule, pen paper log tables, pen paper calculator - the calculator has changed but the basic tech of being able to transcribe and do you own working quickly, and easily flick back to some previous example or notes is where fully electronic technology loses out imo.

I've wondered the same thing as I've seen ads that pretty much every major school district in my area are touting iPads for every student next year. I love new shiny tech, but I feel like 'get of my lawn' curmudgeon being skeptical on the benefits of outfitting every kid with a free-to-use tablet. It's especially frustrating when in the same article about the local district offering iPads to everyone (via a technology-specific millage) that same district is still 500k in the hole after cutting $1 million by way of faculty layoffs.

I haven't looked, but is there research showing that giving every student an iPad improves something?

If the government hands you a massive check, you're going to spend it. Reminds me of my state's subway to nowhere. They never performed any studies to see if the train would be used..... they just had some spare cash, so the spent it. It's a nice train. Just empty. In the "real world" a company that wasted money frivolously would die out, and so that tempers exuberance. In the monopoly that is government/schools, they have no such fear.

I work education IT, and every leadership conference in the last few years have centred around iPads and mobile computing. There are always multiple sessions about how they allow for innovative learning, classroom-less experiences, interactive learning, and a bunch of fancy buzzwords.

Aside from very few cases - autistic kids playing an iPad game show improvement in certain situations is a common example, I haven't seen anything I'd consider an improvement, especially anything that's iPad specific. We've seen many examples of student presentations made with the iPad camera, but they're exactly the same caliber as a regular presentation, or one recorded off any old recording device. They're new and shiny, so people want them. That's generally it.

Worst case, and in general, kids use the new stuff to fuck around. Give a class iPads and laptops, and I'll show you a class of kids watching youtube. At least with the iPad their not playing flash games all day.

We recently had one principal ask how we can support a class set of iPads. We asked what he wanted to use them for, and nobody could give us an answer. There were buzzwords - mobile learning, hands-on learning, etc., but nothing concrete on how they would help the children's education.

Finally I think very few teachers have the skillset required to utilize the new technology in any meaningful way. They don't fit properly with the tried and tested pen and paper methods, and teachers aren't either technologically capable, administratively capable, have the professional development available, or otherwise have the support of their educational system for any meaningful changes. Either they lack the skills, or they lack the support, or iPads just don't fit in an education system.

Bill Gates has been at the forefront of preventing innovation in computing and holding on to old ways of doing things for decades. It stands to reason the he wouldn't be able to understand that computing is possible without a keyboard.

That said, he is right that the equipment and the curriculum must work together. You can't just buy a fancy new toy and expect it to change much. But in the case of tablets, they could easily replace textbooks and printed materials with more interactive alternatives, and of course there'd be no benefit in having a keyboard if that's what you're trying to accomplish.

you dont have to like gates to see what he is saying is not wrong, at least in the short term. a tablet can only do so much, people are always talking about how it is a complementary device. Now gates says as much, and I will bet a lot on/. will be talking shit about how hes wrong. Tablets are great at replacing 40 pounts of textbooks however, as a tablet (with not easy input) is still slightly better than a textbook (no input), low cost desktops (or laptops) are better for students overall.

Was going to say....we've had REGULAR mobile users groups at the college I work at and TONS of people using them in the office and in the classroom. Our pastors at church started using the iPad for sermon notes and it's been a boon to many kids. Bill's just pissed that his Tablet PC and now the Surface may fail.

Every single one of those points, except the point that the iPad has limited multitasking capabilities (and that's somehow a good thing in the classroom), applies to laptops.

SD Unified Purchases 26,000 iPads For District Students:

At 30 kids a classroom, they could have afforded to give 866 teachers a much needed $17k raise with the money they spent on this technology push that will end up abandoned in 3 years. Better yet they could hire new teachers. Watch as those iPads become outdated and can't run the latest OS with the latest and greatest educational apps in 3 years time. Oh, and that's another $260,000 in a couple years to replace the batteries as they go. How often do you have to replace the batteries on a textbook?

The current flash on that page displays a demo of someone using a textbook. THAT is HOW text books SHOULD BE DONE. It doesn't have to be iBooks or an iPad, but that general concept is freaking awesome and just goes to show how Billy and the Gates foundation in general aren't about helping the world so much as finding another way to rip it off.

I would say that a kindle like device would be a good idea simply to replace textbooks etc.

the idea would be to save money not improve education. The books are expensive and the tablets might work out to be cheaper over all.

Think about it this way. The students might get a kindle when they enter high school and it would be theirs. They'd keep it year after year. And at the end of everything they could keep it still. I don't know what the depreciation is on kindles but four years in the hands of a high schoo

Within very specific environments computers and the like are indeed beneficial. But for education in general all these devices do is distract. Kids want toys, teachers mistakenly believe it will ease the burden of teaching and administrators are easily suckered by anything they think will make them look progressive.

Even in college, in a course which required computer use I had to be vigilant about my students dicking around on instead of paying attention. The temptation to partake in other activities is far too strong. And the question is if, even when they're used for their intended purpose, do they actually enhance learning over a printed book and a good teacher? Do they actually aid in the retention of knowledge? I think these questions need to be answered first. But I suspect no one wants them answered because it will reveal all this as the gimmick it is.

What's interesting here is that Bill agrees with Steve Jobs on the tablet issue. Both Bill and Steve advocating against just dropping technology in to improve education. Steve was more direct, but Bill says the same thing, that it's the Teachers that matter, a good teacher can improve students with less technology far more effectively than a mediocre/poor teacher can with lots of technology.

Just having access to books when you need it is reason enough to have tablets or netbooks in schools. Instead of talking about Adam Smith, you can just read his books. Instead of handing out 20-30 thousand page books to all the pupils in the class, all you need is have them download a 1-2MB file. Fully searchable. And that's just one example.

A single tablet can fit all books you'll ever need in school instantly accessible at any time.

Even if tablets do absolutely nothing in the way of improving education in any other way, that's reason enough.

Thanks for the inflammatory headline Slashdot. According to TFA, this is what he said:

Q. Tablet computers are big these days. The Surface tablet was just released by Microsoft last week, and iPads are all over campuses, but it doesn't sound like your approach has been to give devices to students and hope things change that way. What do you think needs to happen for factors like tablets to really make a difference? Or is that not even part of the equation?

A. Just giving people devices has a really horrible track record. You really have to change the curriculum and the teacher. And it's never going to work on a device where you don't have a keyboard-type input. Students aren't there just to read things. They're actually supposed to be able to write and communicate. And so it's going to be more in the PC realm—it's going to be a low-cost PC that lets them be highly interactive.

And he's RIGHT. We've seen this time and time again: some school gets some tech grant and goes on a tech spending spree on crap that in the end do nothing to aid in education. When I was in school, we had initiatives like smart boards, which were expensive and broke so much, teachers ended up using them as expensive whiteboards. Then we had laptop carts, where you trucked around this 10 ton cart to classrooms where none of the laptops were charged all the way and they never worked. And when they did work, they added nothing that a trip to the computer lab would have done.

So just giving students tablets isn't going to work. They'll be fun little novel gadgets, but students need to do real work which includes writing, typing, and other things you cannot do with your fingers. I used a tablet PC throughout college, and it was the best technology investment I made. It was one of those convertible tablets that switched from keyboard mode to laptop mode, and a had a stylus for writing notes. Classmates were constantly begging me for copies of my notes, since I was able to annotate book excerpts and capture chalboard derivations easier than they were able to with traditional PnP. Then the iPad came out and everyone said it was a godsend. I bought one in the hopes of replacing my tablet PC, but I was sorely disappointed at its capabilities. From a student's perspective, it was nothing more than a toy compared to my tablet PC, and I think that's what Bill Gates is getting at.

The submitter seems to think that Bill's words contradict Microsoft's efforts with the Surface, but the Surface is everything I wanted the iPad to be. It can run serious note taking software like One Note. It can *truly* multi task applications. It has digital pen input. It has a slim attachable keyboard. And when I'm at a desk I can connect it to a monitor and keyboard and use Office, Matlab, etc. as many students need to.

It's early tech, they're going to get thinner, lighter, they're going to accept touch and pen input,... couple that with the development on technologies like E-Ink and Foldable displays and in some 10 years they'll be ubiquitous, not just in education but pretty much everywhere.

More importantly the work in UX design that companies like Apple, Palm and Google have been doing has allowed users who are not entirely comfortable with the desktop paradign to stop thinking of these devices less as computers and more as standard household items, like TVs or VCRs.

Do you want to students to create content or consume content? That's the bottom line, tablets are great for consuming content but suck in a not good way for creating anything more than a brief email. Personally I'd rather have students that can create things than consume things.

Bill Gates is following on in the tradition of the Robber Barons of the Industrial Revolution - win big in the capitalist game, then spend the rest of his life making an actual lasting legacy that does real, actual good for folks outside the boardroom and the stock exchanges.

Of course, I'm referring to his charitable works, but I see that he's also gaining some perspective that isn't colored by the need to maximize profits.

I'm impressed with Bill Gates' statement with regards to tablets. He is actually correct - a tablet will neither magically make a struggling student excel nor make a poor teacher miraculously stellar. A tablet is simply a tool and when utilized by a teacher skilled in teaching to various learning styles helps augment said teacher. A tablet can help a motivated, organized student succeed at an even higher level. Our educational system needs to do a better job at motivating students and teaching teachers how to teach. Teacher education is critical yet the colleges and universities are churning out poor teachers. Furthermore, funding has been cut to schools and teacher's salaries making the career much less attractive resulting in a downward spiral.

The problem is not the prediction, the problem is the artificial limits which cripple most tablets models.

Tablets are designed as consumption device only.They do have limited creation input devices. (Artist need to purchase additionnal stylus with better/higher resolution writing capabilities. Other people need to dock the tablet to a keyboard).

Also, the most popular devices, Apple's iPads tend to be a locked down. For example, it could be beneficial to have the student hack around the device and try to exp

Probably because he's a smart guy that made more money than he knows what to do with and is trying to save is legacy Dale Carnegie style by educating himself on many of man kinds most daunting challenges and attempting to solve them. But don't let that stop you from hating on him for bundling IE with Windows 95 almost 20 years ago or whatever somesuch you need to still hate on the guy for.

I don't hate him, I just think that this particular opinion of his has been pulled straight out of his ass. It's not like he hasn't been massively wrong before. It's just my opinion that he doesn't know whether tablets will be good for education any more than anyone else does. I happen to disagree with him, but only time will tell I suppose.

Well no, he's been keeping up with the latest research. It's not a matter of opinion. We have the track record to show just throwing tablets into classrooms just doesn't work, in the same way throwing a gallon of paint at a wall doesn't paint the wall.